Saturday, December 15, 2007

This course is REQUIRED for English
majors in all three concentrations (Literature, Creative Writing, Writing &
Rhetoric). You MUST take ENG 101 within the first two semesters after
completing the core English courses (ENG 16 and two courses from ENG
61-62-63-64). If you are at this stage and you don't take ENG 101 in Spring
2008, then you MUST take it in Fall 2008. You MAY take other ENG courses at the
same time as ENG 101.

What, exactly, is an English major?
What can you do with a degree in English? This course will introduce students
to the three concentrations in the English major: Literary Studies; Creative
Writing; and Writing & Rhetoric. We will perform close readings of literary
texts to understand better the underlying meaning of the work. A brief
introduction to the field of literary criticism will allow students to practice
analyzing texts using literary theory. The study of creative writing provides
an opportunity to exercise creative talents and workshop a piece of writing
with the entire class. Finally, the study of writing and rhetoric will enable
students to trace the types of persuasion used in an argument and to craft a
more persuasive argument in their own work. The class will end with a seminar
on the career opportunities available to students who pursue a degree in
English.

This course is a prerequisite for
ENG 165, 166 and 167. This course is required in the Creative Writing
concentration. It can also be used to satisfy an ENG elective requirement in
the Literature concentration.

The goal of the workshop is to
expand our ideas of “what is a poem” and “what is a work of fiction.” Are
poetry and fiction exclusive or related genres? Weekly assignments will
question preconceived notions of form, content and gender, with emphasis on the
best ways of transcribing thought processes and experiences into writing. We
will also attempt to engage the present moment--the issues of our time, if any,
that influence our writing. Is it possible to write in a vacuum while ignoring
the rest of the world? What is the writer’s responsibility? Can writing change
the world? We will read as models the work of Maurgarite Duras, Lydia Davis,
William Carlos Williams, Bernadette Mayer, Amiri Baraka, Frank O’Hara, Andre
Breton, Ted Berrigan, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and Ernest Hemingway,
among others. Much of the workshop time will be spent on reading and discussing
each other’s writing.

English 129: Later British
Literatures
Professor Louis Parascandola
Mondays/Wednesdays 3:00-4:15

This course is required in the
Literature concentration. It can also be used to satisfy a literature
requirement in the Creative Writing concentration or in the Writing &
Rhetoric concentration.

This course will discuss literary
views of imperialism and the expansion of the British Empire. Major texts will
include Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Joseph Conrad's Heart of
Darkness, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, and Chinua
Achebe's Things Fall Apart. We will also look at shorter poems,
stories, and essays by such authors as Swift, Blake, Dickens, Stevenson,
Kipling, and Orwell. In addition, we will get responses from people of color
who lived and wrote in England such as Equiano, Bennett, and Soyinka.

This course will satisfy a
requirement in the Literature concentration. It can also be used to satisfy a
literature requirement in the Creative Writing concentration or in the Writing
& Rhetoric concentration.

William Shakespeare is the most
recognized figure in English literature, and the diversity of his plays is a
testament to the dynamic world of Elizabethan and Jacobin theater. This course
will introduce students to the London stage and the socio-cultural changes that
influenced Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Students will study plays that represent the
three major genres within drama—tragedy, comedy, and history. They will have an
opportunity to perform scenes from the plays to understand staging and delivery
of lines. In addition, students will also view movie adaptations of
Shakespeare’s plays to consider how his work continues to have an impact on
contemporary culture.

English 159: American Literature
After the Civil War
Professor Carol Allen
Tuesdays & Thursdays 4:30-5:45 pm

This course is required in the
Literature concentration. It can also be used to satisfy a literature
requirement in the Creative Writing concentration or in the Writing &
Rhetoric concentration.

This semester, we will concentrate
on contemporary literature written by authors from the United States. We begin
with the late nineteenth century and regionalism and quickly shift to the
Modernist period that falls between 1914 and 1935, reading texts from the Lost
Generation and the Harlem Renaissance. Around mid-semester, we will move on to
naturalism and, then, post-War pieces by living writers. Expect to encounter
texts in the form of novels, short stories, drama and poetry by Twain, Chestnut,
Faulkner, Stein, Hemingway, Hughes, Hurston, Cullen, Wright, Brooks, Miller,
Albee, Morrison, Cruz, Wideman, and others. A manageable amount of criticism
and theory will also comprise part of our reading list, and whenever possible,
we will avail ourselves of the speakers and events at Long Island University
and in the surrounding community. Assignments will include informal creative
and prose composition, in-class essays, close readings, one oral presentation,
and a final project.

ENG 104 is a prerequisite for this
course. This course will satisfy a requirement in the Creative Writing
concentration. It can also be used to satisfy an ENG elective requirement in
the Literature concentration.

We all have our stories. We live and
tell them everyday. But how do we develop the concentration and confidence to
get them down on the page? This workshop will focus on the way autobiography
and dreams overlap with story writing and how the past can be fictionalized as
a way of giving it a voice-to give the writer both distance from and freedom to
enter our own life stories. The premise is that the source of much fiction is
based on memories and dreams. We'll look at writers of the last century as well
as contemporary writers of today: Jean Toomer, Marguerite Duras, Jorge Luis
Borges, Michael Ondaatje. Lydia Davis, John Berger, Rosemary Waldrop, Ernest
Hemingway, Zora Hurston, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Jamacia Kincaid, and
Sherman Alexie (among others) who often blur the borders between fiction, dream
and life story. We will build up our confidence as we develop our craft and
skill at telling our stories in a new language. We'll concentrate on the
various traditions of narrative, including plot, character, and conflict-with
an eye towards expanding on what's already been done by the masters of the
past. There will be weekly creative writing exercises and games, workshops and
discussions, as well as commentary on the writing process and how to make it
come alive for you. Our writing project will include working with dreams,
secrets, memories, observations, opinions, overheard conversations and random
fragments of language, as well as episodes from our childhoods up through the
present. The goal of the course includes completing a short book of your
stories (a chapbook) and giving a reading in the reading series hosted by the
English Department's MFA in Creative Writing Program.

English 103 is a prerequisite for
this course. This course will satisfy a requirement in either the Writing &
Rhetoric concentration or the Creative Writing concentration. It can also be
used to satisfy an ENG elective requirement in the Literature concentration.

The Creative Nonfiction Workshop is
designed to give you the opportunity to experiment with this genre (the
nonfiction essay infused by literary techniques and devices) in a community of
writers. The focus this semester is on place, history, and testimony, and how
they intertwine in writing inspired by political struggle and resistance.
Originating in Latin American countries among people who were targets of harsh
political repression, testimonio blends history and literature
to give voice to historical experience from a grassroots, eyewitness
perspective. What does it mean to "speak truth to power"? What
happens when people challenge "official histories"? From whose
perspective is most history told? What stories are marginalized, silenced,
erased? And what sort of writing best enables those stories to be heard?

A central course text is Edwidge Danticat's new book, Brother, I'm
Dying, a memoir about her father and uncle, one a Haitian immigrant in New
York City, the other a minister who stayed in Haiti until he was forced at 81
years of age to evacuate in ill health, detained by U.S. Customs, and died in a
prison in Florida. Other texts we may read include testimony by the Mothers of
the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and participants in the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission in South Africa, as well as works by Audre Lorde, Terry Tempest
Williams, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Eduardo Galeano, James Baldwin, and Susan
Griffin. The readings serve both to model and inspire first and third person
narratives that situate individual experience in broad socio-historical
contexts, especially those of people whose stories are less likely to be voiced
from their own perspectives.

In addition to creative nonfiction
techniques and strategies, the course will incorporate oral history, story
circles, and other interactive methods to gather materials. Students will be
encouraged, though not required, to produce multi-modal work integrating text
and images. The emphasis of the class, however, will be on your own writing,
which will be discussed at least twice in workshop during the semester. You
will be required to complete three 4-6-page essays and a 3-5 page reflective
essay.

This course is required in the
Literature concentration. It can also be used to satisfy a literature
requirement in the Creative Writing concentration or in the Writing &
Rhetoric concentration.

Who, what, and where is the
postcolonial? Does the term only relate to the formerly colonized, or does it
also implicate the former colonizers? And what is its relationship to the
realities of diaspora and immigration? This class will explore the concept of
"postcoloniality" through examining literature, film, and theory. We
will look at exciting contemporary texts from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and
Europe and consider them in relationship to their own context as well as to the
world we all share.

This course will satisfy a
requirement in the Literature concentration. It can also be used to satisfy a
literature requirement in the Creative Writing concentration or in the Writing
& Rhetoric concentration.

During this term, we will devote
ourselves to the study of James Joyce's Ulysses. We will examine
Joyce's literary inheritance and influence, specifically invoking the enduring
myth of the wanderer in the alienated modern metropolis, as we determine how
Joyce exploded conventional novelistic boundaries and reshaped the expectations
of the common reader. Joyce's Ulysses has had a profound
impact on Irish, Modern, and World literature. We won't subscribe to one model
of the novel or a singular conceptual paradigm to organize the book but rather
will attend to critical and theoretical issues as they become relevant. Through
the close reading of the novel and the highlighting of specific passages, we
will follow Bloom, Stephen, and Molly through their Dublin wanderings and
discern why this novel continues to capture the imagination. Requirements: One
short paper explicating assigned passages, a class presentation on a critical
article, a final class presentation your research paper, and a final research
paper. Required Texts: course reader (to be distributed); Blamires, The
New Bloomsday Book: a Guide to Ulysses; Brooker, Joyce
Critics:Transitions in Reading and Culture; Gifford and Seidman, Allusions
in Ulysses; Joyce, Ulysses: the Corrected Text, Gabler et
al., eds.

A new writing and rhetoric course
for students in any field, this course will satisfy a requirement in the
Writing & Rhetoric concentration. It can also be used to satisfy an ENG
elective requirement in the Literature concentration.

How does a political candidate’s
speech rouse voters?
How does a lawyer’s argument sway jurors?
How does an organization’s advertisement influence consumers?
How do a song’s lyrics move listeners?

In Contemporary Rhetorical Theory,
we aim to answer these and similar questions about the power of language. The
course is an elective for students across the disciplines as well as in English
who seek to understand the persuasive effect of language in their personal
lives, their communities, and their careers in journalism, law, business, the
health professions, science, technology, education, and the arts.

Students will learn perspectives to
help them recognize how language persuades us of what we believe and whom we
believe. By the end of the semester, students will have developed their
sensitivity to the power in others’ use of language and will become more
empowered in their own use of language.

The main purpose of this course is to produce the cap-stone work for English
majors—the senior thesis. To this end, students in English 190 are expected to
accomplish the following tasks: select a text (or texts) that you want to make
the subject of your thesis, map out an approach to this text, conduct fairly
extensive research on the text and author, then write a formal research
proposal, followed by a draft and a revised final paper. This course will be
conducted along the lines of an advanced, student-centered workshop. That is to
say, students will take center-stage in every class session. Since it is likely
that every student of English 190 will select a different text for his or her
thesis, it is expected that all students be prepared “to teach” their chosen
text to the rest of the class in order to demonstrate their competence in
handling their subject matter. Hence, each student will be called upon
repeatedly to give presentations to the rest of the class. The instructor will
be on hand to give advice and guidance to optimize the results of this
approach. The final grade will be based 60% on the thesis itself and 40% on the
weekly presentations during the course of the semester. While it is possible to
expand a pre-existing paper into your senior thesis, it is at the instructor’s
discretion to make the call whether this is in fact the chosen procedure. Every
student is expected to come to the first class equipped with a short-list of
texts that he or she considers writing about for the senior thesis. Be prepared
to explain to the instructor and to your classmates what attracts you to the
chosen texts and what general idea you want to pursue with your thesis.

English 191: Senior Seminar in
Creative Writing
Professor Lewis Warsh
times to be arranged

This course is required in the
Creative Writing concentration. Times to be arranged; consult the Chair of the
English Department (Professor Sealy Gilles) or the Undergraduate Registration
Advisor (Professor Wayne Berninger) if you think you need to take this course
now.

We will investigate the lives and
writings of various authors (Gertrude Stein, Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Creeley,
Zora Neale Hurston and Frank O’Hara, among others); attend and report on poetry
readings--and give readings ourselves; go to museums; listen to music; keep
intensive reading journals. Our final project will be putting together a
manuscript of our writing.

English 192: Senior Seminar in
Writing & Rhetoric
instructor and times to be arranged

This course is required in the
Writing & Rhetoric concentration. Instructor and times to be arranged;
consult the Chair of the English Department (Professor Sealy Gilles) or the
Undergraduate Registration Advisor (Professor Wayne Berninger) if you think you
need to take this course now.

In this capstone course, English
majors concentrating in Writing and Rhetoric pursue independent research
projects in a range of topics from the history of rhetoric, rhetorical theory,
or rhetoric and gender; they may also develop a nonfiction essay accompanied by
a reflective text that demonstrates theoretical knowledge of the genre and the
writer's rhetorical choices. Students will use a variety of research resources
and submit a formal proposal, a first draft, and a final draft of the paper
(including, in the case of a non-fiction essay, the reflective text). In
addition to required readings on research methods and writing, at least one
research or theoretical text and one nonfiction text, along with selected
critical essays, will be assigned.

Where do our literary traditions
come from, and how do they affect the ways, consciously or unconsciously, we
approach our own creative work? Who gave us our names and do we have to accept
them? While the conventions of popular culture imitate and mimic the past, art
is constantly reinventing itself and simultaneously building upon the literary
traditions that inform who we become as writers. We have choices. Our goal in
this course will be to make the unfamiliar familiar, to uncover the sources and
lineages of our own art by making the past real and practical for the books we
are writing in the 21st Century. We will do close readings of primal poetries
and narratives and examine the crossroads as well as the connections between
oral and written language and the so-called primitive and postmodern while
looking at origins and naming as method and technique in our own writing. We
will explore the use of visions and spells, changes and repetitions, and verbal
invention in ancient to contemporary texts from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Near
East, Oceania, and the Americas. At the core of the course will be the question
of how we can expand upon the techniques and craft of our own poems and
stories. Writers will include those from the Kato Indian to the Bushman and
Navajo, the Tibetan and Aztec, the Eskimo and Egyptian up to the contemporary
poets and fiction writers who have played off these traditions and lineages and
become models for 20th/21st Century avant-garde movements.

A final chapbook, consisting of all
your own new writing, is due at the end of the semester. We will also schedule
a part and give a reading in the reading series hosted by the English
Department's MFA in Creative Writing Program.

This nonfiction writing workshop is designed to give you the opportunity to
experiment with creative nonfiction (the nonfiction essay infused by literary
techniques and devices) through the lens of testimony. The focus of the course
is on place, history, and testimony, and how they intertwine in writing
inspired by political struggle and resistance. Originating in Latin American
countries among people who were targets of harsh political repression, testimonio blends
history and literature to give voice to historical experience from a
grassroots, eyewitness perspective. What does it mean to "speak truth to
power"? What happens when people challenge "official histories"?
From whose perspective is most history told? What stories are marginalized,
silenced, erased? And what sort of writing best enables those stories to be
heard?

A central course text is Edwidge
Danticat's new book, Brother, I'm Dying, a memoir about her father
and uncle, one a Haitian immigrant in New York City, the other a minister who
stayed in Haiti until he was forced at 81 years of age to evacuate in ill
health, detained by U.S. Customs, and died in a prison in Florida. Other texts
we may read include testimony by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina
and participants in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, as
well as works by Audre Lorde, Terry Tempest Williams, Carolina Maria de Jesus,
Eduardo Galeano, James Baldwin, and Susan Griffin, Alessandro Portelli, John
Beverly, George Yudice, and Frederick Jameson. The readings serve to model,
inspire, and interrogate first and third person narratives that situate
individual experience in broad socio-historical contexts.

In addition to creative nonfiction
techniques and strategies, the course will incorporate oral history, story
circles, and other interactive methods to gather materials. Students will be
encouraged, though not required, to produce multi-modal work integrating text
and images. The emphasis of the class is on student writing, which will be
discussed at least twice in workshop during the semester. You will be required
to complete a minimum of three 5-7-page essays and a 4-6-page reflective essay
in which you situate your own writing in relation to the texts and traditions
we study.

The fiction writing workshop is
designed to expose student writers to challenging critical responses to their
work. We will explore strategies for the development of characters: their
sources, their evolutions and the challenges of making them fantastic, credible
and complex. How do we give characters distinct positions in a story that
develop perspective and purpose? Be prepared for weekly writing and rewriting
assignments; you will be asked to present excerpts from your novels-in-progress
or short stories for class discussion. The work of writers as varied as Roberto
Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Denis Johnson, Lydia Davis, Junot Diaz, Ha Jin,
Flannery O'Connor and others will be read and examined.

Jessica Hagedorn, who is the Parsons
Family Professor of Creative Writing at Long Island University in Brooklyn, was
born and raised in the Philippines and came to the United States in her early
teens. Her novels include Dream Jungle, The Gangster Of
Love, which was nominated for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize,
and Dogeaters, which was nominated for a National Book Award.

Hagedorn is also the author of Danger And Beauty, a collection of
poetry and prose, and the editor ofCharlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of
Contemporary Asian American Fiction and Charlie Chan Is Dead
2: At Home In The World. Her poetry, plays and prose have been anthologized
widely.

Recent work in theatre include the musical play, Most Wanted, in
collaboration with composer Mark Bennett and director Michael Greif, at the La
Jolla Playhouse; Fe In The Desert and Stairway To
Heavenfor Campo Santo in San Francisco, and the stage adaptation of Dogeaters,
which was presented at La Jolla Playhouse and at the NYSF/Public Theater
(director: Michael Greif); at SIPA Performance Space in Los Angeles and at the
Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City (director: Jon Lawrence Rivera).

Upcoming theatre projects: The 2007 Manila premiere of Dogeaters,
directed by Bobby Garcia; and Three Vampires, a multimedia
collaboration with director Ping Chong.

Honors and prizes include a 2006 Lucille Lortel Playwrights' Fellowship, a
Guggenheim Fiction Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative
Writing Fellowship, an NEA-TCG Playwriting Residency Fellowship, as well as
fellowships from the Sundance Playwrights' Lab and the Sundance Screenwriters'
Lab.

Hagedorn has taught in the MFA
Creative Writing Programs at Columbia University and New York University, and
at the Yale School Of Drama. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Jerome
Foundation, the Board of Trustees of PEN, the Board of Directors of the
National Book Foundation, the Advisory Board of the Asian American Writers'
Workshop, the Advisory Board of Amerasia Journal at UCLA, and on the Editorial
Board of Random House's Modern Library.

Students will work on a long, serial
poem throughout the semester to investigate the nature of Eros and loss.
Working from these two dual fields or sites, students will construct a serial
poem of approximately 20-25 pages, or a series of related poems, which engage
the topic from multiple perspectives. Students will be asked to write to, from
and around critical questions to frame a poetic inquiry that steps beyond a
sentimental or self-indulgent notion of the subjects. We will aim to enter into
a poetic investigation that engages "new" forms and challenges the
poet's notions of "voice".

Akilah Oliver is a poet. Her most
recent chapbooks are The Putterer's Notebook (Belladonna
Press, 2006), a(A)ugust (Portable Labs at Yo-Yo Press, 2007),
and An Arriving Guard of Angels Thusly Coming to Greet (Farfalla,
McMillan & Parrish, 2004). She is also the author of the she said
dialogues: flesh memory (Smokeproof / Erudite Fangs, 1999), a book of
experimental prose poetry honored by the PEN American Center's "Open
Book" award. She has been artist in residence at Beyond Baroque Literary
Arts Center in Los Angeles, and has received grants from the California Arts
Council, The Flintridge Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. She has
taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Naropa University. She is
currently core faculty at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics'
Summer Writing Program at Naropa University. She lives in Brooklyn.

Toni Morrison's writing career has
spanned over thirty-five years, but the historical net for her fiction and
prose has covered from slavery to the contemporary period. She is one of the
foremost chroniclers of American history, culture and social formations in the
nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Often, her texts are
preoccupied with geography (a sense of place), language, and the physical
limitations of a given age, so we will follow her lead and also concentrate on
place, word (or sound), and time. Our focus will be on Morrison's novels: The
Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, and Love, but we'll give ample attention to her criticism and
essays: Playing in the Dark and other pieces. Supplemental
material includes criticism on Morrison's work and a sampling of texts by
writers that have highly influenced her: Faulkner, Brooks, perhaps Ellison and
Twain. Requirements include a short paper, final project, and at least one oral
report.

During this term, we will devote
ourselves to the study of James Joyce's Ulysses. We will examine
Joyce's literary inheritance and influence, specifically invoking the enduring
myth of the wanderer in the alienated modern metropolis, as we determine how
Joyce exploded conventional novelistic boundaries and reshaped the expectations
of the common reader. Joyce's Ulysses has had a profound
impact on Irish, Modern, and World literature. We won't subscribe to one model
of the novel or a singular conceptual paradigm to organize the book but rather
will attend to critical and theoretical issues as they become relevant. Through
the close reading of the novel and the highlighting of specific passages, we
will follow Bloom, Stephen, and Molly through their Dublin wanderings and
discern why this novel continues to capture the imagination.

Requirements: One short paper
explicating assigned passages, a class presentation on a critical article, a
final class presentation your research paper, and a final research paper.

To write involves making rhetorical choices, and rhetorical theory provides a
crucial foundation upon which teachers of writing can build informed
pedagogies. In this course we will examine rhetorical theories that can help us
to understand and teach persuasive and analytic writing as it manifests itself
in the 21st century. After beginning with the ancient rhetorics of Aristotle
and the Sophists, we will quickly jump ahead to the twentieth century to study
the work of Kenneth Burke, Michel Foucault, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Geneva
Smitherman, Paulo Freire, Stephen Toulmin, Edward Bernays, Jacques Ellul,
Edward Schiappa, and others. Some of the questions we will explore are: What
sorts of persuasive techniques have rhetoricians proposed? What's the
difference (if any) between persuasion and propaganda? When does persuasion
amount to sneaky manipulation and when does it constitute ethical discourse?
How can we teach students (and ourselves) to spot the former and produce the
latter? What is "truth," and how do we present "truthful"
claims in academic and public writing? What is meant by terms such as
"objectivity" and "bias"? What is the role of social
context in individuals' acts of construing and constructing knowledge? Why are
rhetorical strategies—for instance; definition, classification, cause and
effect-—important? How do they relate to the ways we make meaning as
individuals and as a society in realms such as law, public policy, medicine,
education, international relations, communication between different social
groups, our treatment of the environment, and culture? Should these rhetorical
strategies be taught in the writing class? How? Each student will make a
presentation to the class on one of the theories we read, suggesting questions
for investigation and potential pedagogical applications. There will also be a
10-page paper which seeks to address a theoretical question of the student's
choosing.

Nearly all of the world's cultures
have been deeply marked by the experience of colonialism, whether as colonizers
or colonized; the aftereffects are so important that the literatures of most of
the world's population are described (in Western universities, at least) as
"postcolonial." This course will explore some of the imaginative
landmarks and theoretical concepts that have shaped thinking about colonialism
and its consequences for contemporary global culture. We will begin with
Shakespeare's The Tempest, which lays out the mythology of
colonialism; and then turn to anti-colonial resistance, revolt, and revolution
as formulated by the Caribbean and African writers Aimé Césaire, Leopold
Senghor, and Frantz Fanon. More recently, the fierce dualisms of colonialism
and the struggles against it have been supplemented by more nuanced concepts of
hybridity, creolization, and syncretism; women, who were often ignored or
treated as objects, have made their voices heard; and popular culture has
attracted more attention. We will trace these shifts in several theoretical
texts and in two big novels from the Indian subcontinent, Salman Rushdie's Satanic
Verses and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things.

This course prepares graduate
English students to teach in the LIU/Brooklyn Writing Program by examining the
theories and practices that guide the program, including social
constructionism, process writing, portfolio assessment, and thematic course
design and applying those theories and practices to the creation of a viable
English 16 syllabus. In addition, the course will explore managing the
classroom, creating/integrating reading and writing assignments, responding to student
texts, teaching grammar, organizing/facilitating teacher-student conferences,
and addressing the linguistic issues of a multicultural student population.

Possible texts for the course
include Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts by Anthony Petrosky
and David Batholomae, The St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing by
Cheryl Glenn et al., and Portfolio Assessment in the
Reading and Writing Classroom by Robert J. Tierney, Mark A. Carter,
and Laura E. Desai.

Let's begin with Charles Baudelaire
and Arthur Rimbaud—two 19th Century French poets. Baudelaire and Rimbaud were
two of the main precursors to everything that happened in Western poetry in the
20th century. We're going to use our theoretical readings to look at their
poetry and its reception, as well as all the strands that developed out of
their work. Besides these poets, we're going to read Walter Benjamin's study of
Baudelaire, The Writer of Modern Life, and other essays by
Benjamin, as well as many short essays by numerous poets and theorists. We're
going to start off with Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents,
and look closely at Pierre Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production, The
Human Condition by Hannah Arendt, and The Shape of Time by
George Kubler.

I want to test these two methods of
research: the direct, more generic approach, where we go head on at something,
and find out everything about our subject; and the indirect approach, where
everything unrelated to the subject has the potential to count for something,
The indirect approach is tricky, but it's what gives the individual stamp on an
act of research. As a way of doing this, we're going to study the ways of
making connections between different branches of knowledge, and look for relationships
that didn't exist before. The field is endless. Let's try to do as much as we
can, and build something we can use for the future.